Do you remember your first encounter with a digital image?

[Keith]

I was at a friend's party some time in the mid nineties and someone turned up with this little camera that looked a bit different to any film point and shoot I'd seen and informed us all it was digital ... Huh!

She took a couple of pics of people standing around like you do at parties ... then disappeared upstairs to return ten minutes later with half a dozen of the just taken photos printed from the host's computer and inkjet on some basic A4 copy paper.

The crowd of people standing around looking in awe at those images of themselves was quite something ... and it was only fifteen years ago!

 

[benlees]

My Dad brought home a Hewlett-Packard camera sometime in the mid nineties. He was very pleased with it. I believed my response was "Another gadget, huh?" I didn't really care! Of course, at that time I had no interest at all in photography or cameras!

 

[Hexacron]

The first digital image that I remember was printed in Popular Science magazine from the original Sony Mavica camera. It was very grainy and not sharp. I thought that the technology was not good enough to catch on. This was sometime during the mid to late 80's. I like digital images, but I still like film and will use it as long as I can.

 

[Rayt]

When my son was born in Januay 1998 I bought a Sony Mavica to take pictures of him in the hospital. I was and am still impressed with the outcome and the pictures looked good too! The largest I could get out of the files was 5x7 from my R2400.

 

[zumbido]

First Mavicas weren't digital... first digi Mavica was 1997.

I imagine Keith's question was meant to address digital photographs, not images like Illustrator/Quark creations or scans (which I'd been working with since elementary school in the 80s). First photograph from a digital camera that I encountered was one that I took myself with a Nikon cam of some sort that I don't recall, which I "checked out" from my job at the university I attended over a weekend in the summer of '98.

I took a bunch of pictures of candles in the dark at my parents' house that weekend. Remember being really taken in by how interesting the image was (because of, ironically, the low-res "watercolor" nature of it that looked entirely unlike the grain of film).

The equipment manager told me it cost thousands (had a fixed zoom lens and was 1.5MP, iirc). A few months later one of my reportees used it and discovered a bunch of naked photos of the gf of an employee... who must have had friends in high places, as he kept his job.

ETA: On further review, it wasn't a Nikon. Olympus Camedia, one of the big ones with the zoom lens that looked like a camcorder. Maybe the 1400XL. Which would have put it around $1000, apparently.

 

[PatrickONeill]

In 94' I saw a PJ at a football game with the biggest motorwinder I've ever seen. it was a Kodak DCS / Nikon DSLR.

 

[Sonnar Brian]

It was in 1981. Two-Color scanning Infrared Sensor that produced 32x512 two-color images on 7-track computer tape. I had an $80,000 Gould Deanza IP8500 to view the images. Hung off of a $500K Vax 11/780 with and FPS 120b array processor.

 

[zumbido]

Oooo, I just remembered an earlier one. My aunt had an Apple ][e. We visited every year around Thanksgiving or Christmas, and in about 1985 or so she was able to check out a VHS camera from work and a digitizer card that plugged into the ][e and used a program called something-Magick or something like that to produce digital images on the green screen. If I remember right, they weren't made up of pure "pixels"--it used some simple algorithm with maybe half a dozen ASCII characters to help smooth out edges and add some depth.

 

[Gregoryniss]

Being 20, I've grown up / am growing up in the digital age.

 

[Thardy]

I saw a guy with a nikon (not dslr) at a party in the late 90s. It looked pretty cool.

 

[batterytypehah!]

I was an early adopter (shame on me). I had an Apple QuickTake 100 in '95/'96. Was working for a small magazine at the time and we actually ran some - very small - shots we took with it.

A technologically challenged friend fried the circuitry when the batteries ran out and he decided to try some power brick he had lying around. Still have the corpse, actually.

 

[maddoc]

A Kodak something digital P&S at a conference that we had organized in our university. It was a co-organized conference and the staff from the other institute brought one of these Kodak P&S cameras to take a couple of snaps of invited speaker and hand them out a print soon after their presentations. I was able to borrow that camera for 10 minutes and quickly took some snaps of my UHV system with newly installed Omicron XPS analyzer. 🙂

 

[Rayt]

Being 20, I've grown up / am growing up in the digital age.

My 13 year old is a reader; he reads a full length novel a week on average aside from school work so our place is running out of space. I don't want to get rid of the books until his brother has had a chance to enjoy them. For Christmas I gave him a Kindle and my Amazon account so he can download any book he wanted anytime. He rejected the Kindle and said that he prefers to feel real paper in his hands. He tells me he is a "traditional man in a digital world". A chip off the old block he is!

 

[Mudman]

Sony Mavica in 6th or 7th grade. Used a floppy disk. The teacher had us take a photo of ourselves for a website that we each had to make (basic html only)

 

[ItsReallyDarren]

Two cameras pop up in my memory.

The first was some kind of point and shoot from Casio. It was my dad's camera and I remember making some remark about how mushy the details were. This was probably around 1998/1999.
The second was the first Canon G1, also my fathers, I remember being annoyed at the fake shutter sound.

 

[jarski]

you people have been in digital already in -90's 😱

wasn't much into cameras/photography back then, but it was all film. first digi came around 2003, p&s bought from work trip to Malaysia.

 

[ibraz]

1993, a scanned picture on a macintosh color classic.
I still use this computer sometimes when I need to tipe and print stuff fast as my laptop isn't always plugged to the printer.

 

[oftheherd]

I'm not sure, but I would guess it was around 1994 or 1995. I had a growing interest in digital, scanning, photography, etc. My daughters got me a cheap on for Christmas. It was very low resolution, and gave graining oof photos. I had to take it back. Always looked for an affordable higher resolution. When I finally got one (4 MP), I decided it was neat, but couldn't beat film. I haven't changed my mind.

 

[BillBingham2]

I got a Epson Photo PC upgraded it to 8 MB of memory so I could post pictures on our Intranet (that I ran at the time). Still have it in hopes of Epson running a trade-in on a Digital R-something or another. Reminded me of a Kodak Folder but without the folding, one big rectangle. One of my first pictures is of my son (1996) as a baby that I still love.

B2 (;->

 

[Keith]

First Mavicas weren't digital... first digi Mavica was 1997.

I imagine Keith's question was meant to address digital photographs, not images like Illustrator/Quark creations or scans (which I'd been working with since elementary school in the 80s). First photograph from a digital camera that I encountered was one that I took myself with a Nikon cam of some sort that I don't recall, which I "checked out" from my job at the university I attended over a weekend in the summer of '98.

I took a bunch of pictures of candles in the dark at my parents' house that weekend. Remember being really taken in by how interesting the image was (because of, ironically, the low-res "watercolor" nature of it that looked entirely unlike the grain of film).

The equipment manager told me it cost thousands (had a fixed zoom lens and was 1.5MP, iirc). A few months later one of my reportees used it and discovered a bunch of naked photos of the gf of an employee... who must have had friends in high places, as he kept his job.

ETA: On further review, it wasn't a Nikon. Olympus Camedia, one of the big ones with the zoom lens that looked like a camcorder. Maybe the 1400XL. Which would have put it around $1000, apparently.

Good point ... I should have said photographs!